new year, new resolutions?
I am pretty sure that if you are here, you already want to help your dog make better choices and teach them new skills using patience, kindness and quality learning strategies with your dog. But maybe you are not being so generous and kind to yourself. maybe you are working yourself to the bone, trying to really double-down and give your dog all the enrichment, exercise, training, activities, play dates, etc that you can? maybe you worry that you have made your dog worse, and feel guilty about ignoring or failing your dog?
You want to make your dog’s life better by working on the things that stress your dog out and create behavior problems, right? you want other people to see the cute, silly, fun side of your dog … you want to be able to enjoy your dog more? there are ways to do that without being unkind to yourself and without burning out.
This time of year is full of resolutions to do more, do better, commit to change. if you are ready to start working on your dog’s behavior and on your relationship with your dog, please do contact us.
But also: start to think about how you can work smarter, not harder on your goals. here are some guidelines…
lots of rest is required for your dog’s training and enrichment to be most effective, you need to make sure your dog is sleeping a lot and sleeping well. you do not need to make sure your dog is entertained and active all the time. puppies need 18-20 hours of sleep per day and adult dogs need 12-14 hours, depending on their size. grumpy, overtired, overstimulated dogs are going to act out more, not less!
slow is fast when working on behavior change and skills, you want to focus on increasing difficulty very very slowly, building on success. mastery happens through repetition and just because your dog has been successful a few times, they do not “know” the behavior and are not fluent yet. true habit changes take time, and flashy skills take lots of repetition.
quality over quantity will pay off in the long run. it is very tempting to keep training and training, because we humans feel better when we are doing something to fix the problem. dogs need short successful experiences and time to integrate what they learned, however. good training sessions can be as short as one minute long, and you can accomplish a lot with just 20 minutes of training every other day. doing a forced march toward success usually backfires, in life and in dog training!
timing is everything. if you are working on skills that your dog is not ready for, or if you are communicating with your dog when your dog is distracted, then your timing is off and you will not see the return on investment you deserve. preparing the foundations for your dog and setting up your training sessions so your dog is attentive and ready to work will really speed up your progress.
